When no one's watching

Friday

For months, prosecutors say, technicians in a run-down North Carolina plant prepared life-sustaining syringes and shipped them before ensuring they were sterile.

For months, prosecutors say, technicians in a run-down North Carolina plant prepared life-sustaining syringes and shipped them before ensuring they were sterile.

Dushyant Patel's AM2PAT Inc. produced heparin and saline syringes that killed five people and sickened hundreds of others, some resulting in spinal meningitis and permanent brain damage.

The plant's manager and its quality control director were each sentenced Monday to 4½ years in prison for fraud and allowing tainted drugs into the marketplace. Authorities are searching for Patel, who they believe has fled to his native India.

The North Carolina case is tragically similar to the disregard for consumer health that congressional leaders portrayed in the salmonella outbreak traced to products from a Georgia peanut plant. That incident sickened 600 people and may have contributed to nine deaths.

"You hardly turn around, and the FDA is breaking news," said Ned Feder, a staff scientist at the Washington-based nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. "If it isn't peanuts in Georgia, it's syringes in North Carolina.

"They're completely different (cases), but they can both be traced back to the fact that the FDA doesn't have the manpower to do the policing it needs to do."

That means the Food and Drug Administration must rely to some extent on the honesty of manufacturers. The most glaring similarity between the two cases, in addition to an apparent lack of FDA oversight, is the wholesale disregard for public safety because of concern for the bottom line, because a lot of money was on the line.

That should give us pause, especially in this time of economic stress.

It also should be a reminder that oversight is not only necessary to ensure the safety of the food supply and the medical industry but also that it will grow more and more important as the federal government begins handing out the billions and billions of dollars from the economic stimulus plan. The White House and Congress are under considerable and appropriate pressure to see that the money is put to good use.

That pressure resulted in a provision in the stimulus legislation directing that more than $350 million go to oversight. President Barack Obama has promised transparency in government. The greatest test of that pledge could come in how effective and aggressive the government's oversight will be.

There is already concern that money will flow so quickly to two dozen inspector-general offices as well as a new Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board that even spending the oversight money will be difficult. In other words, the auditors may need auditors.

With billions on the table, it would be a leap of fantasy to believe that those bent on larceny - or at least gaming the system - won't belly up. They always do. Remember the Pentagon's $435 claw hammer, the $640 toilet seat and $7,600 coffee makers?

Just wait. The federal budget is roughly $3 trillion. The stimulus package signed by the president was for $787 billion, an amount equal to about a quarter of the federal budget.

There is fear in some quarters that even $787 billion is not enough money to jolt the economy back to life. But when you see the kind of numbers out there and realize that this money will be scattered over thousands of government agencies and programs, you have to ask, is $350 million for oversight too little?

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